


every little thing she does is magic

by strikinglight



Series: Stopping for a Spell [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/F, Festivals, Friends to Lovers, Language of Flowers, Summer Solstice, magic inn au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 11:03:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9488288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: As Mila lay in the grass with her head in Sara Crispino’s lap, listening to her speak, it came clear—being without this girl, watching her fold under someone else’s want and become someone’s wife, would be the first real sorrow of her life. And just then, on the heels of such a seemingly unassuming sequence of words, she’d known what she might do.“I could make something for you. Some charm, to keep the men away if you don’t want them.”“You do that well enough on your own, Milena.” Sara laughed. When she looked down and caught Mila’s gaze, a spark danced in her eye, and her smile went a little crooked at the edges, knowing and wry. “I don’t think I’d need any charms if I simply stayed by your side all the time.”





	

It was nearly noon, and the young summer sun was climbing quickly, arcing above their heads as it dried the morning’s dew off the grass and scorched rosy swathes across the high planes of Mila’s cheeks. Her legs swung from the fence around the paddock where the cows were grazing, one hand holding her body steady on the rails. The other extended out toward the girl standing beside her, palm open for the slivers of orange peel she was stripping, quickly, without even looking, from the body of the fruit.

“You don’t need to take that, you know,” Sara told her, matter-of-fact. “We can throw it in one of the squash plots on the way back. It’ll feed the earth.”

As she slipped the peel into her apron pocket, Mila inclined her head down to answer. Her eyes came to rest on the other girl and remained there, lingering on her face, on her fingers as they split the orange down the middle and broke off a slice. “I have use for it anyway. Ground orange peel in hot water helps cleanse the lungs.”

“I’ll remember that the next time Michele complains of hay fever.” Sara smiled. She didn’t take the first piece for herself, but instead passed it across into Mila’s now-empty hand. “Did you learn that from Mari?”

“Ah, I—no.” At the same moment Mila’s teeth broke the flesh and spilled the juice onto her tongue, ripe and sweet, just tart enough to wake the senses up. If the next words slipped out a little stilted, tentative, she might chalk it up less to something like embarrassment and more to talking with her mouth full. “Isabella told me.”

Sara’s smile had a burn to it too, Mila thought, however soft it might appear at first glance. More than the shape her mouth made, it was her eyes. They had an uncanny tendency to look long at so many apparently innocuous things, piercing through, seeing straight to the heart. “I’m missing Isabella more and more these days.”

It was a story that had swept through the town with the spring thaws, taken root and grown with the first buds—how one of the many wizards staying at the Katsuki family’s inn had one day seen a gift in the shoemaker’s daughter. Allegedly all that happened was that he’d watched her patch up a scraped knee on one of the farmers’ brats, and declared—loudly, by all accounts, and with great insistence—that there had been magic in whatever she’d just done. And while at the outset no one had believed it, not even Isabella herself, one thing had somehow led to another, and all of a sudden he’d taken her under his wing. Jean-Jacques the Healer (as Mila had found he was wont to call himself, as though there were no other healers in all the world, or at least none so powerful or important), who had simply been passing through the village en route back to the royal city, would remain in Hasetsu to teach this girl his art—an honor he had never even thought to accord another, for all that the Masters at the mages’ academy had been pressing him to take on an apprentice of his own from the minute he’d received his wizard’s robes.

There had been a fair bit of whispering about it among the villagers in the days that followed; what a surprise it was, to be sure, for such a remarkable talent to have simmered unnoticed in their midst for so long. All this time it had been so easy to assume that all that was uncanny about Isabella Yang the shoemaker’s daughter was that she was so very pretty.

Mila and Sara, who had known Isabella from the cradle, had wanted to think they understood her better than anybody else. The three of them had been born in successive years and grown up practically joined at the hip, a trio of scabby, earthen girls forever scrambling up trees, scuffling through swathes of high grass. In those days it had been Mila, the only child of the witch at the inn who’d served the Katsuki family as barkeep and apothecary and charm-weaver, who’d been most obviously touched by the magic. She’d been born into it, raised in it. Sara had always liked to joke that in comparison she and Isabella were as ordinary as blades of grass, but Mila remembered thinking even as a child that maybe there had been something—something mysterious about the way the youngest girl’s cuts and bruises seemed to mend faster than anyone else’s, the way her smooth skin remained fair and unburnt however many hours they spent in the sun.

As the years passed and the three grew up, everyone else had written it off as beauty. Both Mila and Sara had recognized it for something more, but couldn’t imagine then how to go about making her believe. Only the inimitable Jean-Jacques, it seemed, had known how to do that; or how to begin it, at least.

“Still, maybe they’re good for one another. I wonder if she might even come to love him.”

“Jean-Jacques is _old,_ Sara. And she’s known him less than a season.”

Less than a season—meaning, not long at all. Then again, Isabella’s hair had been long a season past, a lustrous sheet of black satin rippling straight down her back. Long as she’d kept it all her life. But just a few weeks ago, at the turn of the summer, she’d cut off the whole length of it—or she’d had someone else cut it for her, though Mila still couldn’t imagine who might have said yes. It was too heavy, she’d said, when Mila had stopped her in one of the corridors at the inn and stared at her as though she’d grown three sets of eyes. It took too much time to tie up. It got in the way, always falling forward over her shoulders when she bent over the children to inspect their wounds. And what appeared to be such a small change on the surface had felt to Mila like a tremor, a shifting in the very ground beneath their feet.

“Not so old, and neither of those things matter as much as you think, sweet.” Sara started to laugh, her full lips glossy with juice, the melody of it pealing out bright and golden—and Mila had no choice then but to drop her eyes to the ground, the better to pretend the flames being lit in her cheeks were nothing more than sunburn. “My mother says love keeps its own hours.”

Mila wanted to say, working pensively through the last of the orange slices, that if love were a guest in her house she’d turn it away at the door; rude of it, really, to appear so often unnanounced. But that was a lie, of course—and such a big one that the plain, barefaced untruth of it made her bite down sharply on her tongue instead.

 

* * *

  

A season ago, Sara Crispino had been only one of the farmers’ daughters. She’d helped work the fields for years, ever since she was strong enough to lift a sickle, but she and her brother Michele were seventeen this summer, nearly old enough to inherit. In light of this their mother and father had begun to devolve more work down to them, little by little, steadily more complex, grown-up tasks. Michele had begun to learn bookkeeping, Sara to study the unique composition of the soil on their lands and which vegetables were best to grow at which times of year, and Mila had begun to wonder why there seemed to be such a great chasm of experience between sixteen and seventeen, when being six and seven, eleven and twelve, fourteen and fifteen had felt like nothing at all.

A year ago no one—Mila least of all—had failed to notice when the young men in town began to slow down and turn from their work when the farmer’s daughter passed them on the street with a bushel of wheat or a broken hoe balanced on one shoulder, glancing back and craning their necks to aching to follow her with their eyes. Mila had hung close to her side then, as often as she could, deflecting the stares with a venomous returning glare and a rude and vaguely occult-looking hand gesture, but of late the young men’s mothers, too, had begun to whisper at market and in the streets—something about brides and Sara Crispino, heiress to half her family’s lands and holdings. Something about how capable she’d been proving herself to be and how beautiful she had grown.

Sara told Mila, naturally—and Isabella, on days they could steal her from her mentor for an hour or two—whenever someone made her an offer. One week it was the butcher’s boy who had come to pay court, the week after that the baker. The week after that it was the chief shepherd’s son, and the day after him the shoemaker’s apprentice, Isabella’s cousin Peter—though this last suit was stammering and shamefaced and over in fifteen minutes with no small measure of laughter. Peter had known from the first that Sara would have none of it, and had only gone to please his uncle, and she had laughed and sent him on his way with a pat on the shoulder and a promise that they’d always be friends, plus a few bottles of their best fresh milk for his family, to divert the scolding that he was sure to receive when he arrived home.

Even without Isabella, she told Mila everything because that was what they’d always done; all their lives they’d told each other everything, sitting together in one of the fields at day’s end, leaning against a fallen tree and watching the workers troop toward home. It was a ritual, almost, a pocket of time that was sacred because it was theirs.

“But do you _have_ to marry anyone?” Mila asked, sprawled on her back with her head in Sara’s lap, at the end of the Peter anecdote. It was close to midsummer now, and she’d found herself losing patience—not with Sara herself, never, but with the increasing frequency of her suitor stories. She hadn’t been able to stop fidgeting since they’d started to talk, so she’d pulled up a few blades of grass, begun to braid them together into a bracelet to keep her restless fingers busy. “What did your parents say?”

The other girl only shrugged, beginning to set to the same work on a few stray strands of Mila’s hair, smoothing the curls between her fingers before she started to weave and plait them. “That it’s up to me.” After a pause, she added, “But they did tell me more than once that I’d do well to consider it.”

“And _have_ you considered it?”

“Many times. And more and more I start to think it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing not to marry, keep house for myself instead. Mistress Minako has no husband, and neither does Mari Katsuki.” Then she smiled, fondly, and tweaked at the shell of Mila’s ear. “And your mother never had one, and you’ve told me time and again you don’t want one—and at the end of the day, the four of you are the strongest women I know.”

 _Strong._ Mila said the word silently to herself, puzzling over how it might fit. Perhaps it was only that she’d been raised to look after herself, and not to grieve or brood overlong about loss. She had not wept at twelve when her mother had packed all her vials and pills and potions up into a single wrapping-cloth and left the inn, saying only that the wind was calling her to wander for a while, leaving her half-grown daughter in the Katsuki family’s care. In the years that followed Mila had not begrudged her, content to welcome the hawk that came to the inn a handful of times each year bearing a letter, a little trinket or two—a string of seashells from the villages along the southern coast, pressed herbs from the peaks of the highest mountains. The mother’s flighty, inexplicable wandering was no pain, no void; it simply was what it was, and since then the daughter had come to know many women who’d similarly grown used to being on their own.

“I’m not anyone special.” The praise made Mila blush and bite her lip, swat at the hand in her hair. “ _You_ might still find someone, though. Someone who hasn’t come yet. Emil, or one of the mages.”

There, again—the acrid taste in her mouth, the twisting in her gut. It made her push on, ask more questions, even though she knew full well Sara must already get enough grief about this from her brother. Enough clinging, enough needling, suspicious, unreasonable overprotectiveness. But her friend met her with a firm, steady good humor, with light fingertips combing across Mila’s brow and a conciliatory smile that made her lean her head into the touch, chastised.

“What would a mage want with someone like me? And Emil is a friend, yours as well as mine. You know who he comes to see, when he visits my house.”

Maybe so. Granted, it might have been unfair of her to scapegoat Emil like that—tall, breezy Emil who made the worst jokes and loved to collect old pieces of scrap metal for his inventions, the only boy ever allowed into their sacred circle of three, and then only on market day, when one of the girls needed help carrying their baskets. Every other night he was a supper guest at the Crispino home, but Mila did have an inkling of what it might mean that his seat at their table was always at its edge, on Michele’s right hand.

Not Emil, then. But Emil wasn’t the only young man in town of marriageable age, and still it irked Mila to think about so many others opening their eyes as if for the first time to marvel at something _she’d_ known all her life, natural as the color of the sky, or the sequence of the seasons.

“I will say,” Sara added, gently as ever, drawing Mila out of the mass of knots her thoughts were quickly beginning to tangle themselves into, “it can be tiring, to keep having to say no.”

As Mila lay in the grass with her head in Sara Crispino’s lap, listening to her speak, it came clear—being without this girl, watching her fold under someone else’s want and become someone’s wife, would be the first real sorrow of her life. And just then, on the heels of such a seemingly unassuming sequence of words, she’d known what she might do.

“I could make something for you. Some charm, to keep the men away if you don’t want them.”

 _“You_ do that well enough on your own, Milena.” Sara laughed. When she looked down and caught Mila’s gaze, a spark danced in her eye, and her smile went a little crooked at the edges, knowing and wry. “I don’t think I’d need any charms if I simply stayed by your side all the time.”

“As if I can be with you _all_ the time,” she protested, rolling to prop herself onto one elbow, pushing herself back upright as she felt her face heat. On impulse she took Sara’s hand in her own, sliding the ring of woven grass she’d been making over it until it sat loose around her wrist. “Consider this my promise that I’ll have something for you by Sunreturn.”

“You mean in three days?”

Was it only three days? All the gods be damned—but also she’d gladly accept damnation herself before going back on this particular vow. “Do you believe I can do it?”

And Sara, beautiful Sara Crispino, looked down at her wrist and nodded her head, said only that she was sure Mila could come up with such a charm if anyone could, and that she would look forward to the summer festival all the more now—still smiling that strange smile that made Mila wonder if she knew all the world’s secrets, or if she might be keeping a few of her own.

 

* * *

 

Mila went first to her own books that night, bending down over the pages at the bar after dinner while Mari washed the glasses and wiped the counter clean, but found precious little to go on—charms for love, charms to sow it in the heart and to encourage it to grow once it had taken root, divining charms by which the caster might learn if their love was returned, but, mysteriously, not a single one to divert it when it wasn’t wanted. There was no shortage, too, of spells of misdirection and concealment, but she found that somehow none of them were quite what she was looking for; not specific enough to the situation to be truly useful. She might try to combine two or three of them, or to use one after the other and hope the effects would somehow run together in a way suited to her purposes, but—

“Oy, straighten up a bit there.” Mari rapped at the small of her back with the long-stemmed pipe in her hand, making Mila jerk upright, torn from her reading with a surprised yelp. “You’ll warp your bones, hunching so.”

Sure enough there were more than a few knots at the base of her spine, but as she kneaded at the aching muscle with her fingers she couldn’t help wondering if the tangles inside her head weren’t even more troublesome—and more painful. “I just can’t seem to find what I need, Mari. I’ve read these volumes you gave me nearly cover to cover.”

“What did you expect, with such a tall order?” Mari clicked her tongue in sympathy, bringing the unlit pipe to her mouth. “No one wants to turn away love, my girl. But you could sleep on it, and ask someone else in the morning. Jean-Jacques, or some other.”

Mila snorted. Apart from his power and the breadth of his knowledge she had found precious little to love about Jean-Jacques, and that was putting it mildly. The truth was she’d decided fairly early on that she’d as soon drop a live lizard into his tea as look at him; knowledge or no, to ask for his help about something so delicate was unthinkable. But it was not nearly so hard, or so distasteful, to catch Isabella in her net early the following morning as the girl waited patiently in the inn’s dining room for her teacher to finish washing his face, the basket on the table next to her packed with everything they might need when they went into town for the day—bandages, packets of dried herbs, mortar and pestle, a scalpel and a pair of scissors polished to a fine gleam.

“You want people to stop falling in love with Sara?” Hearing Isabella say it aloud in the empty room drove home to Mila like nothing else how ridiculous this little quest of hers truly sounded. But her friend must have seen the look on her face, because immediately she reached out to press her hand, continuing more softly, “Honestly, I don’t know if Jean-Jacques or I can help you, Mila. It’s not an illness you’re dealing with—not the kind that white magic can heal, anyway.”

“Well, then, maybe you should tell that master of yours that he ought not to go around telling the whole world there’s nothing he can’t cure,” she retorted, and bent to rest her head sideways on the tabletop in despair. Isabella only smiled and continued to hold her hand, the other reaching up to pat at Mila’s hair in that tender, consoling way that could soothe even the rowdiest of the village children, but the sound of a door being flung forcefully open somewhere upstairs interrupted her before she could reply.

“Who’s that I see in the common room? Could it be my pupil?” They heard Jean-Jacques before they saw him, a disembodied voice trumpeting down to them from the second floor, making Mila straighten up and roll her eyes and Isabella bring her sleeve close to her mouth to suppress a giggle. Not three seconds later he was sliding sideways down the banister, leaping off the end and coming down nimbly onto the soles of his feet, descending straightaway into a low bow. “Good morning, Isabella. And to you, Millie.”

Mila had long ago written off correcting him herself as a lost cause, but she shot her friend a glare anyway, received an apologetic look in return. “Good morning, Jean-Jacques.”

“You look out of sorts,” he said, crossing the room with long strides to stand by Isabella’s chair, folding his arms across his chest. “Something the matter? Hay fever? Indigestion? Summer rash?”

Isabella stepped in, wisely, probably having noted the twitch in Mila’s eye, the cracked edges of a smile that looked more like a baring of teeth than anything else. “Mila’s thinking hard about something, Jean-Jacques, that’s all. But she’s more than capable of working through the problem on her own, I’m sure.” She squeezed Mila’s hand a final time before rising to her feet, signaling in no uncertain terms that the conversation was over. “We should go. There’s a good number of calls we need to pay today.”

“I see you’re on top of things as always.” Mila thought she saw something soften then in Jean-Jacques’ face, the glossy, gleaming armor of all his pomp and braggadocio sliding back until he looked almost fond. But too quickly he caught her watching him over Isabella’s shoulder; too quickly she blinked and it was gone, and he was smirking again, fit to crack his face in two. “Goodbye, Millie. If you have any more trouble getting that lovely head of yours around whatever it is, you can ask for my help anytime.”

Again, that sense of something shifting, some trick of the light. Jean-Jacques had a way of speaking—some very rare times—that made him sound almost kind. There was something, too, to the way he took the basket from Isabella’s hands and settled it on his own arm, and the way he held the door open and gestured for her to go before him, that might make one almost think he might be—

But before the door slid shut he’d glanced over his shoulder and winked at her, and the inside of Mila’s mouth had soured all over again. Then it slotted back into place, leaving her alone with the furniture, the morning sunlight streaming through the open windows, and a promise she didn’t have the faintest idea how to begin keeping. Arms folded on the table, fingers combing restively through her hair, Mila dropped her head forward again and let out another long, heavy breath.

“Those sighs don’t become you, Milena Firehair,” a familiar voice spoke over her shoulder, singsong and silvery, completely unexpected. “Let’s have a smile.”

She could have sworn he had not been there when she’d come down and found Isabella earlier, nor had she seen him enter the inn in the minutes between that and the healers’ departure just now, whether by front door or back door or chimney or any of the windows. It was not that he’d hidden himself either, with some cloaking spell that she knew she’d have sensed, even given the chasms of difference between his power and hers. Instead he simply had not been there—and now he was, perched backward on one of the stools at the empty bar, elbows braced against the countertop and long legs stretched out before him, a grin on his face to rival the full moon at its height.

Mila sighed again, making a play at exasperation, but just the sight of him made her heart lift; before she knew it, she’d already begun to grin back, getting up from her chair to take the stool next to his instead. “Would it kill you to use a door?”

“It’s not a good show if the audience knows where to look right away.” An automatic response to a complaint he’d doubtless heard innumerable times before—as many times as he’d returned from his regular sojourns to the royal city—and she knew it. Victor laughed, reaching out to ruffle her hair with one gloved hand. “So, you’re working a reverse-love-charm for pretty Sara Crispino. Have you tried combining spells?”

The mere mention of Sara’s name seemed to be enough to send all the blood in her body to her face, reddening her skin from hairline to shoulders until she looked like she’d been sunk headfirst into a pot of boiling water. It was good of Victor, at least, not to have asked her reasons; much easier to go straight to talking craft instead. “I thought about it a little, last night, but I don’t think Aunty Hiroko would have much love left for me if I burned her inn down.”

“You’re practically her third child, so she’d forgive you in time,” he told her, wiggling his eyebrows for emphasis. “It’s what I would have tried to do in your situation, but you’re clearly much wiser than I was at your age.”

She frowned. “And you’d have me use this wisdom... how?”

“Just by doing what you’re doing—asking for help. You may be loath to accept anything of the kind from Jean-Jacques, but I wonder if you wouldn’t say no to mine.”

As if anyone who lived and breathed could say no, Mila thought with a snort. Her own personal fondness for Victor aside, she didn’t think she’d ever met anyone with such a magnetic presence; never mind that those who encountered him might also be infected with a vague urge to strangle him for the many outrageous things he said or did. She’d asked him more than once in the past if this draw of his had anything to do with his gift, but Victor had denied it with a wave of the hand; couldn’t it simply be that he was just that charming?

Still, she knew—Victor came and went in his own time, but now, newly returned as he was, there’d be others more important than she who’d be looking to avail of his _charms._

“You’ve only just come back,” she pointed out, her eyes straying of their own accord to the stairs leading up to the guest rooms, up and up still to the highest floors where the mages of Hasetsu made their homes. “I figured you’d want to spend all your time with Yuuri.”

“Today, perhaps, but tomorrow he and Phichit will be busy dawn to dusk making fireworks for the festival. Which means I’ll be all yours.” He leaned forward, a conspiratorial gleam in his blue, blue eyes. “If nothing else, I’m sure you could use another brain to pick.”

 

* * *

 

Victor was as good as his word, for all his apparent flightiness. As the dining area emptied out after breakfast and the various guests and inhabitants of the Hasetsu Inn returned to their rooms, or departed for town to see to the day’s business, he rose from his seat at the long table where the Katsuki family always took their meals, and strode over to stand across from Mila at the bar—the better to, in his words, “put their heads together.”

It wasn’t unheard-of by any means to engineer a spell or a potion from scratch. The masters did it all the time, taking a word or two from one charm, a gesture from another, mixing disparate ingredients in order to produce something entirely new, but such a process necessitated an all-encompassing knowledge of the components to be used—and power enough to keep lightning or fire or whatever else under control should the mixing go awry. Mila knew she was young yet, and over the course of her studies had taken care to quiet her desire to take risks in favor of slowing down, doing things by the book.

“I’ve never tried anything like this before. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I said you were wise, didn’t I?” Victor beamed at her, by all appearances appreciative of her caution. “You know—maybe better than I—how many people there are to learn from here. Come, Milena.”

She came out from behind the counter and took the hand he was offering, and together they went up to the reading room on the third floor, which over time had come to serve as a personal workroom for Victor’s old master, Yakov. As the years passed the aging wizard with the bald head and the craggy face had become one of the inn’s oldest friends and by far its most constant patron, and though he had a foul temper and a surprisingly quick hand for someone so old, always ready to lash out at wayward students with a closed fist or the end of his cane, most everyone at the inn and in the town knew him to be wise too, and unsparing in his kindnesses to those who sought his help.

Still, the years had not entirely killed Mila’s fear of running afoul of him. To this day she’d kept the habit of making her steps light when she passed his door, creeping by as unobtrusively as possible, so she couldn’t quite keep the horror out of her face when Victor neglected even to knock. Instead he swung the door to the reading room all the way open and stepped in with his arms spread, singing out an airy “Yakov, it’s me!”

Mila hung back, squeezing the back of Victor’s robe in one fist, and nearly shut her eyes, but there was no burst of searing light, no scorching fire. When she tiptoed a little closer and peered into the room over his shoulder there was only Yakov in one of the armchairs, regarding them dourly as usual, and his most recent apprentice Yuri, seated cross-legged on the rug among stacks and stacks of books piled almost as high as he was tall, the thick leatherbound volume open in his lap nearly as wide across as his shoulders.

“I was wrong to assume you’d finally leave me in peace once you earned your master’s robes,” he griped, but lifted one gnarled hand to motion them in. “Well, may as well not dawdle, Vitya—come in, tell me what you need, and have done with it. And close the door behind you.”

Some of the terror returned when the protective screen that was Victor stepped away, moving out of Mila’s field of view to lean against one wall. “Actually, Yakov, it’s Milena who has need of you, this time. She’s working on a new spell.” At this he looked meaningfully at her, and she found herself suddenly seized by a powerful urge to take one of Yakov’s books and wallop him across the face with it. “I’m merely serving as her assistant.”

Yakov’s hawk-eyes came to rest on her face, hard and piercing, and there was nothing to be done then but to tell him.

“I’m... putting together a charm for a friend. She’s been having trouble turning away her suitors.”

“If she has someone with a face like yours always hanging around, it’s a wonder anyone comes to talk to her at all,” a biting voice piped up from the floor—Yuri, clearly rankled at having had his studying interrupted. “Just stay near her all the time, for gods’ sake.”

Mila might have opened her mouth then to say something acerbic in reply, but Yakov, as always, was faster. “You’re in no position to contribute to this discussion, boy, shirking your reading so. Those lists of names won’t memorize themselves.” Yuri huffed but returned to his book—on closer inspection, some kind of bestiary, its pages covered in finely detailed sketches of various birds—blowing a stray strand of hair out of his face. Yakov, meanwhile, turned back to Mila. “Tell me about this friend of yours.”

What was there to tell? She might say a hundred things to Yakov, but the words tangled somewhere in the back of her mind and never made it to her mouth, and with her throat and her chest tightening up with the effort of saying _anything_ of worth, anything at all, she stammered, “Her name is Sara Crispino. She’s a year older than I am, and about to inherit her parents’ farm. She tells me she’d rather not marry.” She swallowed down the unnecessary things. The secret things—the sound of Sara’s laugh, or her curious eyes, the clear deep violet of the night sky in summer, scattered all through with stars. “We grew up together. Her and me and Isabella Yang, the shoemaker’s daughter.”

It was barely anything, but Yakov listened, nodding now and again, his face as grave and inscrutable as the side of a mountain. When she had finished, he got up and walked slowly to the window, pushing it open and clipping a fistful of fennel sprigs from the planter’s box outside. Returning, he handed them to her.

“Yurochka, you might remind your friend Milena what fennel flowers are good for.”

“Do you want me to take part in this conversation or don’t you, old man?” Yuri, head still bent over the pages of his book, must have felt rather than seen Yakov’s glare; without pause he went on, in his typical sour tone, reciting from memory. “When chewed and ingested, or used in tea, fennel freshens the breath and improves the memory. It can also be hung over doorways to keep out ghosts. Carrying fennel flowers builds confidence and courage, and may influence others to trust one’s words.” He rolled his eyes as he finished, as if to say _Are you happy now?_

Yakov ignored his student’s peevishness; to Mila he said only, “Well, there you have it,” effectively declaring the discussion at an end. It was only when the reading room door closed behind her and she and Victor found themselves standing once more in the middle of the hallway that she managed to utter the question she hadn’t thought it prudent to ask inside.

“What am I supposed to do with these, Vitya?”

“Hold on to them, and be patient.” He smiled and took up her hand again. “Let’s go upstairs.”

But there _was_ no upstairs. Hiroko and Toshiya had always made it a point to house the mages on the inn’s third floor, relatively isolated from the regular guests to minimize the possibility of—this was the exact word they had used, Mila remembered— _accidents._ The only possible upstairs they could access from there was the attic.

“Victor.” She didn’t follow, tugged at his hand to stop him as he began to make his way toward the narrow, winding flight of stairs at the end of the hall. “This is too much, I think. I want to drive Sara’s suitors away, not kill them.”

Victor only laughed, as he always seemed to do at things that scared her, head thrown back and mouth wide with mirth as though her apprehensions were the funniest jokes he’d ever heard. “Tell me, Milena. Are you afraid when night falls?”

“Well, no.” Night meant rest. It meant people coming home at the end of a long day, filling up the first-floor dining hall. Sometimes it meant music, singing, being together. Stars and fireflies. People needed the night as much as they needed to wake up in the morning—she knew that much. “It’s only the end of the day.”

“This darkness is much the same,” he assured her, and pulled her along gently, unsticking her feet from the floor in an instant. “Trust me.”

The attic room door creaked open onto a near-opaque darkness, lit only by one high window in the far wall and a few pale orbs of werelight hovering in the air, by which Mila could only just make out the shapes of things inside—desk, chair, mattress, bookshelf, dusty many-branched candelabra. A cauldron in one corner. Runes in some unknown language, scrawled in chalk over the walls and the floor.

A long-limbed, black-robed figure stirred in the chair, drawing its hood down further over its face as it turned to them. “Your presence is blinding as always, Vitya.”

“You know I always try my best, Georgi, old friend.” Victor stepped in undeterred, leading Mila and ushering her forward toward the desk. “My friend here would ask something of you.”

Mila had heard of Georgi once or twice, a schoolfriend of Victor’s from the days of his apprenticeship. Victor himself had brought him to the inn some moons ago, but he shrank from brightly lit surroundings and thus had had to keep to the attic for most of his stay so far. Mila hadn’t been sure if his aversion to light had anything to do with his peculiar areas of concentration—she’d never personally encountered a mage who dealt in the dark arts, hexes and curses and spirit-summonings and the like—and thought it would be imprudent to ask Hiroko or Toshiya, and so had simply avoided the attic room. Most days, she barely remembered it—and he—existed at all.

She had scarcely begun to think of a safe way to phrase her question when she found herself face to face with the dark mage himself, who had at some point unbeknownst to her stood up and come close enough to study her, bending down to peer into her face with keen interest. Somehow it still came as a surprise to find a face underneath that voluminous hood—the eyes deep-set and mournful and ringed with some kind of powdery grey pigment, but unmistakably human eyes.

“I’ve never seen your light before. It’s almost as if you’ve brought the sun into my room.” He turned away, reaching down toward his desk and pulling what appeared to be a flower out of a glass vase. This he handed to her, stem-first, as though touching her hands might burn him—a single long-stemmed, starburst-shaped chrysanthemum, stark white in the glow of the werelights. “Take this and go. Looking at you makes me feel close to tears.”

Mila obeyed and took it, bewildered, unsure whether to tell him _Thank you_ or _I’m sorry,_ but she was saved from having to say either by Victor’s arm about her shoulders, guiding her out of the room. There was no Yuri now to explain things to her, but as she proceeded back down the steps ahead of Victor it wasn’t hard to go back to her own herblore. White chrysanthemum, the truth-telling flower.  

“Good things come in threes,” Victor told her, when they reached the bottom of the staircase and came out once more into the third-floor corridor. He would have known, of course, that she’d been about to ask what next. “There’s one more call you might pay.”

One more? One more. Mila chewed at her lower lip and cycled back through her mind, counting off the rest of the mages at the inn one at a time. Yuuri and Phichit would be busy with their preparations for tomorrow’s festival. Leo, too, would likely be at work on his instruments—laying his hands on lute and flute and viol, setting tuning spells, sending some of his aura into them, that they might play themselves for the duration of the dancing. Seung-gil the earth mage would be out at this time of day, probably at the mine by the spring, and anyway she knew he’d much rather speak to his piles of rocks and minerals than to her. That left only—

 _“You!_ It’s you!” she exclaimed, laughing as she slapped at his shoulder, once, twice, three times. “Vitya, you great big ham! I thought I already _did_ ask for your help.”

“As a friend, surely. You should have known to ask extra-nicely if it was the wizard you wanted.”

 _Was_ it the wizard she wanted, though? Victor’s trade, from what she knew, was in illusions and other similar enchantments—changing-spells and sleight of hand, little tricks meant to beguile and amuse. “Well, what could Victor Nikiforov the great possibly do for me? Will you lay a glamor on Sara to make her ugly? Grow a horn out of her forehead, or give her another nose, or something?”

“No! By all the gods, no.” He laughed, batting halfheartedly at her prodding hands, eyes sparkling with some knowledge she still couldn’t fully understand, no matter how she tried. “She’s too lovely to subject to such things, your Sara. I couldn’t possibly. For you, I have something better. Come.”

He led her this time back down to the first floor, through the kitchen and out the back door, into the yard behind. Maintenance for this little garden had lapsed as business at the inn had begun to flourish, and it had long ago gone to weed. Maybe one of these days, Mila had heard Hiroko say from time to time, someone might come who could be trusted to tame it and bring it to bloom, but for now the only flowers growing there were wild ox-eye daisies, bursts of yellow and white amid the grey-green overgrowth.

These blossoms Victor went down on one knee in the grass to pick, one by one, dropping them into Mila’s lap. Without even stopping to think about it, so naturally it was as though her hands had started moving with a life of their own, she began to weave and twine the stems together—daisies and fennel flowers looping around in a circle to make a wreath, the white chrysanthemum set in their midst like a jewel.

“Yuuri loves daisies best of all, you know,” Victor told her, his smile gone soft and tender now as he watched her work, for once not playful, mischievous, or sly. “Because of him I’ve come to as well.”

“I can see why,” she said. “They suit a heart like his.”

Again, silently, she recited her herblore. Fennel for courage. Chrysanthemum for truth. The day’s eye, the most common, most unassuming of field flowers, for love—love of the pure, simple kind that covered the earth and endured.

After Mila finished her weaving, Victor took the crown she had made in his hands, murmuring a spell under his breath to keep the flowers fresh and hold them in place.

“You’d do well not to forget Georgi’s words. You have a heart like the midsummer sun; anyone with eyes to see would know that if you let them.” He set the crown upon her head with all the gravity of a cleric naming a queen, and then as he stood he winked at her, all the old mischief newly returned—because, really, with Victor, nothing on earth could banish it from his face for long. “Remember that when you go to the festival tomorrow, Milena Firehair.”

She could only nod, already half-expecting him to pull one of his usual vanishing acts, disappear in a puff of smoke or fade out of her sight until she was barely sure he’d ever been there at all. Instead—just this once, and to her great surprise—he chose a more everyday exit, bending to kiss her lightly on the brow before he turned on his heel and walked, on his own two human feet, back into the inn.

 

* * *

 

Perhaps it only stood to reason that, plan or no plan, Mila spent much of the next day on tenterhooks, choosing to apply herself with an almost vicious attention to her chores around the inn. In the morning she swept the floor, wiped down the bar twice, polished the silverware in the kitchen. In the afternoon she washed all the good goblets and rolled out a few barrels of the best wine from the storehouse, loaded these and some baskets of bread and wheels of cheese onto the back of a wagon. Within the hour she was saying goodbye to Yuuri as he made ready to drive it into town, squeezed up in the front seat with the reins in his hands and Victor and Phichit on either side of him. The firecrackers and the paper lanterns they had spent all of yesterday making were probably already in the square, stacked in neat piles and waiting patiently for the hand that would strike the first spark.

At sunset, after she’d changed into her best dress and set the flower crown back upon her head, she met Isabella in the front yard of the inn. Together they fell into the long straggling line of people, walking arm in arm toward town. A number of the man carried bundles of wood on their backs, or bales of hay—tinder for the bonfires that gave the feast of Sunreturn its name. Midsummer eve was the longest day of the year, and the aim of the festival was to stretch the hours as long as they could go, each fire lit in the town square serving as its own little sun, burning on and on into the night.

The bonfires were already stoked high when they reached the center of town, and the streets thronged with people, eating the food from the feasting table, drinking wine. Almost immediately Mila caught sight of Sara, standing with a cup in front of one of the fruit stalls, flanked by Emil and Michele, and lifted her arm in greeting. In response she saw the older girl wave back, murmur something like _Later_ to her brother over her shoulder before she started to cross the square.

“Blessed Sunreturn,” she said, when she reached them at last. Up close, the biggest of the fires shone on her, casting a glow on her face, the wine-red damask of her dress. “You both look so beautiful.”

The words opened up a desert in Mila’s throat. Isabella must have had the presence of mind to see it in her face—and there was no greater blessing, Mila thought, than finding her friend ready in a heartbeat with a smile and a “So do you, Sara. A blessed Sunreturn.” She might have been just about ready to kiss the youngest girl when Isabella went on, in light of the glass in Sara’s hand and no doubt also in consideration for Mila’s mysteriously parched throat and rapidly waning courage, “We ought to drink to something.”

“We should, we should,” Sara agreed, and as Minami the kitchen boy passed with a full tray one sure hand darted out to tap him on the shoulder. She passed her own goblet into Mila’s hands and took two more, handing one across to Isabella and holding the other up to the flickering, orange-tinted light. “Call the toast.”

Mila swallowed hard, and quickly sent up a prayer her voice would come out as something more dignified than the croak of a very small frog. “To us?”

“To us!” the other two answered, cheery and eager over the crystalline sound of glasses clinking, and they drank. The wine was sweet and sparkling, soothing the knots in Mila’s throat and pooling warm in the pit of her stomach.

Out of the corner of one eye she could see Leo take up his fiddle, ringed all around by the rest of his bespelled instruments, and begin to play. All the songs for Sunreturn were meant for dancing, and he was wise to begin with the Haymakers’ Jig, the lively notes calling people from their plates and cups and into long lines to begin the dance. As they handed Isabella off to her cousin Peter and watched the two of them disappear into the crowd, Mila glimpsed Jean-Jacques standing off to one side with his arms crossed, features schooled as usual into a self-satisfied expression—but again she saw something not quite right.

“Give me a minute?” she murmured to Sara, pressing the other girl’s arm. “There’s something I need to do.” At Sara’s nod of assent she flung out her hand and only just managed to catch Minami on his next trip round, taking another full goblet from his tray and stalking toward the healer, thrusting it right under his nose.

“Maybe some of this liquid courage will cure that cowardice of yours.” The wine sloshed dangerously from side to side, threatened to spill over the brim and onto his white linen shirt, but at the last minute it held steady, and she held his eye the same until he took the cup from her. “You’d better not miss her, the next dance.”

She didn’t bother to wait for his answer. Instead she chose to whirl around and head back to Sara, too aware of the cabal of young men gathering on the other side of the fire—watching her, watching the two of them. Sara felt no need to do much more than ignore the attention, it seemed, draining the last of her wine and handing her empty cup off to another boy with a tray, shooting Mila an amused look as she drew back up to her side.

“Sweet of you to let him know he has your approval.”

“He has no such thing. I just hate that sulky look of his.” The truth was she knew what she’d seen—some wistfulness in his expression, some longing she’d recognized in her own face, many times. Disgusting to think they might have anything at all in common, and yet here she was, making the same gambles.

“I have something to give you.”

With hands gone clumsy and tremulous and leaden from the wrists up Mila lifted the crown of flowers she had made from her head and set it on Sara’s own, and felt herself go breathless at the sight of it—white and golden star-shapes on her brow, luminous against the dark fall of her braided hair. The word for it was _beautiful_ , of course, but that wasn’t all. Mila had known that she was beautiful before she’d ever known her name—had known, in an unassuming, shadowy, secret way that she was more even than that. Sara Crispino was strong and spirited and quick-minded and possibly the most extraordinary person in all the world, enchanting in an entirely different way from all the mages in Hasetsu. That she didn’t have a single drop of power in her had never seemed to matter.

It was for this reason that Mila nearly laughed out loud when Sara reached up with careful fingertips and touched the petals in her hair—said, in a voice full of wonder, completely oblivious to her own magic, “Is this your charm?”

“Part of it. I learned over the past couple of days that there are no spells to turn away offers of love. Instead, I want—” She paused, drew in a breath, tore her eyes briefly away from Sara’s face to search for some reassuring sign of Victor in the crowd. Was it really only a day ago that he’d spoken to her in the inn garden about courage, told her how brilliantly her own heart could burn, if she only cared to show someone? “I want to make you an offer of my own.”

It was the only way she could get her tongue around it. The only way she knew how to say it, and it didn’t feel like nearly enough—but then in the midst of all her searching Sara reached out and took both Mila’s hands in her own, and in the light of the Sunreturn fires Mila found them work-roughened and graceful and strong, felt the warmth of them flow into her all the way down to her bones. It was clear, then, that she understood. Possibly she had always understood.

“What would you give me that we haven’t already given each other, my Milena? You already know I love you best in the whole world.”

How easy it was, all of a sudden, to hear her say it. Mila thought she should have hated for it to sound so easy, after all the trouble she’d gone just to bring herself to this moment, but perhaps it was only fitting too, to remember how quickly the world itself might change, without warning.

“A dance,” she said. All the courage she’d pulled from the wine, from the fire, from Sara’s fingers entangled in her own bubbled up within her like a wellspring without end. “Or all the dances, rather. Every one of them, if you’ll have me.”

“I hope you can keep up.” Sara smiled at her, and pressed the shape of that smile deep into the backs of Mila’s hands when she brought them to her lips and kissed them. “There is no nightfall on the feast of Sunreturn.”

Above their heads the stars were coming out, and the first of the fireworks too, rocketing upward and bursting into bloom, bright blue and green against the dusky sky—but it seemed to Mila that what lit up the world that night was no fire but the true burning midsummer sun at its height, pouring down on them, shining about them as they laughed and stepped together into the whirling dance.

**Author's Note:**

> Title lifted from--of course--the song by Sting.
> 
> Also, the actual Haymakers' Jig is one of the cutest dances I've ever watched [and you absolutely need to see it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXbfGprH6zc)
> 
> Also also, I've tried to make it so that this fic can stand on its own, but for those lovely souls following the rest of _Stopping for a Spell_ and wondering how this particular piece fits in with the rest of the gigantic puzzle that is this AU, this takes place about a year back from the main timeline (i.e. the timeline along which all the Otayuri shenanigans are set, sometime in the winter and on the way into spring).


End file.
